Iain Martin

Iain Martin is a political commentator, and a former editor of The Scotsman and former deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph. He is the author of Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the men who blew up the British economy, published by Simon & Schuster.. As well as this blog, he writes a column for The Sunday Telegraph. You can read more about Iain by visiting his website

In the last decade the BBC has done much to improve its coverage of business. It has hired a string of respected figures and good journalists – Jeff Randall, Robert Peston and now Kamal Ahmed – as business editor and has strength and depth in its reporting team. This has produced a dramatic change in the tenor of the Beeb's coverage. Whereas in my youth the Corporation only tended to cover business with relish when a leading business person committed a criminal offence, discredited Thatcherism or fell off a yacht, there is now much more serious attention paid to the part of the economy which creates jobs and employs many millions of Britons.

Despite these positive developments, there is clearly still a Marxist sleeper cell, intent on discrediting capitalism, operating at the heart of the BBC. How else can one explain the existence of the Apprentice?

While Gordon Brown was burbling on in the Commons yesterday about the constitution, and in his usual fashion taking no responsibility whatsoever for the mess he helped cause, a fascinating report was being discussed elsewhere.

The Future of England Survey was produced by constitutional specialists and is based on in-depth polling on attitudes. It is worth reading it in its entirety, particularly now that all manner of schemes are being suggested by politicians for the creation of regional government in England in the wake of the Scottish referendum. Whatever the merits of such proposals, and the need for some larger cities to be given the powers that booming London enjoys, the report makes clear that there is almost no enthusiasm on the part of English voters for the country being divided up into regional assemblies.

Today's PMQs should have been relatively straightforward for David Cameron. He arrived boosted by more good news on the unemployment front and his own side is greatly enjoying the difficulty in which Ed Miliband finds himself. Everything that can go wrong for the Labour leader seems to be going wrong. In tabloid land he was mocked this morning when a star of EastEnders gave a less than flattering account of their exchange at an awards ceremony. Then the jobs figures landed. Miliband also had a bad throat and he began at PMQs by declaring, in response to the employment numbers, that when anyone gets a new job it is always great news for their family. I'm not sure that David Miliband, beaten to the Labour leadership by his brother, would agree with that.

However, Miliband had planned ahead and went on the attack against Cameron, asking him about comments made at… Read More

Voters of Britain! Feeling forgotten, ignored and overlooked? Worried that other people are getting all the media attention? Concerned that no-one is interested in you because you don't live in Clacton or in a northern Labour seat in which the party's canvassing operation has been allowed to decay in recent decades to the extent that Ed Miliband's get out the vote machine now consists of one clipboard and three of those little pens purloined from a bookmakers?

Ever find yourself looking at pictures of Nigel Farage in the newspapers, with his eyes popping and that massive grin, and think: Is it just me that isn't in on the joke?

Are you struggling to answer a host of other questions, including: how did Neil Hamilton get back on the telly? Who is Paul Nuttall? Why does no-one in Clacton realise that Douglas Carswell is an enthusiast for mass immigration, driverless cars and introducing… Read More

Eurosceptic politics used to be a lot like the famous scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, in which a group of revolutionaries – intent on bringing down the Roman Empire – sit in an amphitheatre discussing the various sects into which their movement has subdivided. They contemplate the People’s Front of Judea, the Judean People’s Front and the Judean Popular People’s Front (“Splitters!”). What, asks one of the revolutionaries, ever happened to the Popular Front? “He’s over there,” says the leader, pointing to a rival sitting forlornly on his own.

In the early Nineties, Britain’s Eurosceptics were a similarly divided rabble. The Maastricht Treaty, signed in 1992 by John Major, had turned the looser European Economic Community into the much more integrated European Union and cleared the way for the… Read More

Clacton has fallen. Cameron's forces have been routed. In Heywood and Middleton, in Greater Manchester, a desperate rearguard action by Labour has held off Ukip, for now. The people's purple army is on the march.

Down in the Westminster bunker, assorted members of leadership class are meeting in the map room desperately trying to work out what to do. What about the 9th Army? Could it not be deployed? No. It has ceased to exist. Where are the promised wonder weapons that were supposed to see off Ukip by now and reduce it to the 3.1% it got in 2010. Would sending in Theresa May make a difference? Might Jeremy Hunt man the barricades?

In Downfall, the Second World War cinematic epic about the fall of Berlin, we know what happens next. The members of the leadership class either flee or choose to end it all in the rubble. The Westminster bunker… Read More

What with the threat of imminent catastrophe on multiple fronts, and Nick Clegg being Deputy Prime Minister, and whining cricketers complaining about their lot when they should be thanking their lucky stars for the chance to play cricket for a living, it is easy at the moment to get downhearted about Britain and its prospects.

Here – as autumn kicks in – are five reasons to feel good about Great Britain.

1) In this country even the Sex Pistols end up being co-opted by the Establishment. Thirty seven years ago they appalled the Duke of Edinburgh with their rendition of God Save the Queen (markedly different lyrics, music and arrangement to the original). This morning John Lydon, the lead singer of said popular punk combo, was on BBC Radio 4 promoting his new book. Interviewed on the Today programme, he made a half-hearted attempt at sounding outrageous when he claimed that the… Read More

When the main stories reported from party conference by the media are the emptiness of the hall and the state of the party leader's trousers, then the Liberal Democrats have a problem. Ah, cry the Lib Dems, echoing the complaint of traduced smaller parties down the ages, that is all the fault of the media. Inside the hall, they say, we were discussing airport expansion (they voted against) and selling off council houses and the right to die. After a few hours of hanging around watching these subjects be discussed by a small gathering of Lib Dem activists in a cavernous hall I know I would demand the right to commit suicide.

Poking fun is what the media, or the more irreverent parts of the media, does when presented with a not very interesting event that the news schedules demand must be covered. Pictures of people snoozing, surrounded by empty row… Read More

According to Nick Clegg, the party conferences of Labour, Ukip and the Conservatives were mere canapés to stimulate our appetite. Now we can move onto the real meat and potatoes: the Liberal Democrat conference in Glasgow this weekend.

You have to had it to the guy (OK, you don’t have to hand it to him if you don’t want to) but Clegg does at least seem to retain a sense of humour about his party’s dire predicament. With the election getting uncomfortably close, the Lib Dems are still polling almost as badly as Margaret Thatcher in a Welsh mining village in 1985.

In the ten most recent national polls the party’s numbers, in reverse order, have been as follows: 7, 6, 7, 8, 7, 10, 7, 7, 7, 6. For a political outfit in the business of attracting votes thi… Read More

Bye bye Brum. I must confess that I watched Cameron's speech today on TV with a cup of tea in London, rather than in the hall, because I left Tory conference yesterday evening. However, before boarding the train home I did experience my personal highlight of the party conference season. That was another visit to the ace Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, home to a tremendous collection of pictures. Not only does it contain all that pre-Raphaelite stuff, the Edward Burne-Jones collection, and some good Italian paintings. There is also a 1974 reconstruction of the sculptor Jacob Epstein's Rock Drill, featuring a giant machine-like figure sitting astride an enormous metal drill. The original, first shown in 1913, prefigured the horrors of the First World War's industrialised slaughter and looks like a template for modern Hollywood's vision of the robotic killing machine of the future. Gazing at Rock Drill, the… Read More